April 30, 2015

A chipped tooth here. A southern drawl there. A tendency to put too much sugar in one’s tea. A habit of correcting other people’s grammar.

These are all characteristics that someone, somewhere possesses. In fact, several people probably correct grammar whenever they can. And think of the millions of people with chipped teeth. That’s why it’s so hard to come up with a completely original character. While I’ve never based one of my characters on a particular person I know in real life, I do create characters that are a blend of several people I’ve known or seen on TV or read about in books. It can’t be helped.

Our lives are full of past experiences and exposure to a variety of people and places. This colors the way we see the world, whether we’re aware of it or not.

When I sit down to think up a new character, I usually start with the physical characteristics. First, should it be a man or a woman? Let’s do a woman this time. What color should her hair be? Blonde. This immediately brings to mind all the blondes I can think of. Let’s give her the same shade of color that I noticed the receptionist at the dental office has. That was a nice honey color. And so I continue with all the other physical features, like height, eye color, and whether she wears glasses. In almost every case, these characteristics will be based on ones I’ve seen before.

Even when it’s time to decide on a personality type, I think to myself, “Let’s make her one of those people who’s always meddling.” That statement right there tells me I’m building this character on someone I’ve met in the past. While I strive to create a wholly new personality each and every time, bits and pieces of others have a way of sneaking in and taking over.

And that’s okay. I don’t think readers mind one bit. As long as the character I’ve created isn’t a complete copy of someone else, I like it when a reader says to herself, “Oh, I know someone like that,” or, “That reminds me of so-and-so.” A little familiarity helps a reader connect with the story. It makes her feel like she’s part of what’s happening, even if my character reminds her of her annoying Aunt Sue or rude Uncle Harry.

They say familiarity breeds contempt. But sometimes, familiarity just makes people feel comfortable.

April 28, 2015

If writers did have perfect vision, people would recognize themselves in what we write. But as the other LadyKillers have pointed out, people don't. Partly that's because we mix and match traits and characteristics across characters to serve the needs of the story's conflict. For example, the amazing tact and loyalty of my little brother might inspire me to write a character with those two traits, but that character isn't going to look, sound, or act anything like my real little brother by the time I reach The End, because it isn't the story of my little brother's life. I may need my mother's stoicism, my father's reverse-class prejudice, or my crazy cousin's alcoholism to move the story forward. Everything serves the story. Everything.

There's another reason people don't recognize themselves even when they are the basis for a character--none of us has perfect vision. The way I see my brother is filtered through the lens of my reality, which isn't the same lens as anyone else in my family, much less the world. The way he sees himself is fundamentally different than the way his wife or his children see him.

Take another example. I just got through seeing the play "The Audience" starring Helen Mirren. In that play, we see Queen Elizabeth at many stages of her life--but she's the Queen as understood by the playwright, director, and the actress. No work of fiction can ever capture the complicated nature of a whole human soul. They just give us the impression of one, like a Monet painting gives us the feeling of lilies in a pond.

So if you read your friend's first mystery novel, don't even try to guess which part of you is in which character in the book. Your friend doesn't see the same You that you do.

“Oh, so you write mysteries? Guess I better not offend you or you’ll put me into one of your books as the villain or the corpse. Isn’t that what you guys do?"

Er, no…

If I could write characters based on real people, I’d be writing non-fiction. In fact, I thought I could easily deal with Queen Eleanor of Castile, Edward I’s wife, but discovered that even someone who isn’t at the top of most people’s list of controversial and well-known figures is extremely hard for me to include in a book. Maybe I will just refer to her and some of her more interesting aspects, but can I really have her walking around in my mysteries?

That said, there are few writers who do not include real people in some way in their fiction. Eugene O’Neill spent his life retelling his family story. Maybe he actually thought he wasn’t writing about the same people over and over? Many writers don’t even know they are doing this, although the reader often does. So I will have to ‘fess up that I do include a few flesh and blood types within the fictional. At least parts thereof…

My prioress and her monk look a lot like my maternal grandparents. Since they had nine children, it is clear the resemblance pretty much ends with hair color and disparate height. Oh, and Arthur the cat is based on a blending of a couple of felines who have owned me. There is a bit of myself in Sister Ruth, although I have to admit there is a bit of me in every one of my characters, including the villains.

So we all do base characters on real people, even if the aspect of real is minuscule.

April 27, 2015

Characters based on real people: aren't they all? To protect the guilty, we change age, names, gender, ethnicity, but every one I've written has been based on someone I know, once knew or, often, wish I didn't.

Do writers ever worry that the person we've described as unfit for social contact will recognize himself? Here's a story that will ease your mind.

When I was a very new fiction writer, I gave my protagonist a friend who was based on an annoying woman I'd been forced to hang out with in real life. But I neglected to change her profile except to give her a different name. In the book, her name is Leanne. Here I'll call her Peri, short for persnickety. Peri, (the woman and the character) was prissy, nosy, and intrusive; she'd ruin a joke by correcting the smallest detail of your story and remove a nanopiece of lint on your sweater with a damning tsk-tsk.

When the book came out I did a signing at my home town library. My sister-in-law, who'd read the book, was traveling with me and accompanied me to the event. It had been a terribly humid August with a heat wave that was 17 days running, but on this night we were excited because there was the slightest chance of rain. The small talk before the event revolved around prayers for a life-saving shower. Except for Peri, who showed up carrying a folding umbrella that matched her shorts.

After a few minutes of observing Peri, my S-I-L leaned in to me. "That's your Leanne, isn't it?"

Suddenly I was worried. OMG, if my S-I-L, who'd never met Peri before could ID her from my book, I was in trouble. When Peri came up to me later, I was a wreck with worry. Here's the conversation:

Peri: You know that character Leanne in your book?

Me (gasping internally): Yes?

Peri (sotto voce): She's based on Verna, isn't she?

Me (gasping externally): Yes!

**

A few friends/characters on a special day

People read what they want to read into the characters in a book. Another example:

In my Periodic Table mysteries, I give my protagonist a BFF named Rose. Here are a few responses:

From Friend A: I know Rose is really me, because she has 3 kids, like me.

From Friend B: I know Rose is really me, because she's petite, like me.

From Friend C: I know Rose is really me, because she loves to shop, like me.

From Friend D: I know Rose is really me, because she has red highlights, like me.

And so on, to Friend Z: I know Rose is really me, because she drinks wine.

April 25, 2015

Camille Minichino and Ann Parker attend MWA Edgar Week festivities next week. Look for them at the banquet and say hello!

Michael A. Black gives a CSI presentation in Madison, Wisconsin this weekend, where participants try their hand as CSI investigators at a staged scene. At the end of the presentation, Michael tells them what would really happen.

Mysti Berry is a spoiled brat--she gets to hang out in New York, then be on a panel at Malice Domestic (Sunday, 10:00 AM, "Are We There Yet? Vacation Mysteries"), and then she flies off to Edinburgh for a week's writing retreat. Some people have all the luck! She'll be sharing her trip in blog posts and photos.

Next Week

Fans and journalists often ask writers "Are your characters based on real people?" Every writer's answer to this question is unique, and some of them are even truthful. Join us next week as we share what we think and do about basing characters on real people.

April 24, 2015

The morning sun streams in my office window as I sit at my desk making my to-do list for the day. I like making to-do lists because it's easy. Accomplishing the items listed -- that's a different story.

And on this particular morning, coming up with a different story is much on my mind.

I'm contemplating this when my Muse, yawning and stretching, wanders into the room.

"There you are!" I can hear the relief in my voice. "I thought you'd be here hours ago."

"Good morning to you, too," she says. "What are you up to, that you're so bright and cheerful such an early hour?"

It's past ten o'clock, but I don't point this out. What I point to is the to-do list. She picks it up and reads:

Organize office.Make progress on editing current manuscript.Write blog post for The LadyKillers.Go grocery shopping.Come up with idea for next novel.

"You've done all these things already?" She nods approvingly. "I'm impressed. We haven't even had breakfast yet. Speaking of which, I was thinking bacon and eggs, maybe some hashbrowns …"

"We don't have any potatoes. Or bacon. That list isn't what I've done. It's what I'm going to do today. I haven't started yet. I've been waiting for you. I need your help."

She raised her eyebrows. "Organize office. Ha! Not even I can perform miracles like that. At least, not before breakfast. How about a ham-and-cheese omelet?"

"We're out of eggs too."

"Fresh fruit, then, with granola and yogurt and--"

"No fruit either. Did you not see grocery shopping on the list?" I take the paper from her. "It's the last item I need your help with. Come up with idea for next novel. I'm almost finished with the second Claire Scanlan book, and I don't know what's coming next in the series. It's been driving me crazy. You're the expert at this sort of thing. Please, give me some inspiration. Bring me to the flashpoint that will ignite the new story. The first was House of Whispers. I'm calling the second one House of Desire. The third one will be House of …" I wait for my Muse to fill in the blank.

"Pancakes!" she says, and claps her hand with delight.

"House of Pancakes?"

"Yes! Light, fluffy pancakes. With butter and maple syrup, maybe some strawberry jam. If you don't have anything to make breakfast with, we'll go out to eat."

"I had tea and toast earlier. Much earlier."

My Muse lifts her hands in a gesture I've come to know well. She uses it to express her exasperation. "Well, you can hardly expect me to come up with flashpoints on an empty stomach."

I suppose it's a fair trade--breakfast in exchange for inspiration. Besides, all this talk about food is making me hungry. "All right, you win. Let's go."

"Yippee!" She claps her hands.

I grab my purse, and we head for the car. Soon we're sliding into a restaurant booth.

"House of Pancakes," I mutter as the waitress hands us menus.

"Yes," my Muse says happily. "Wouldn't that be brilliant? In this book, Claire Scanlan will get into a volatile situation where she--"

April 23, 2015

This week we're talking about flashpoints here at the Ladykillers blog. Flashpoints are the points in a story (or in life) where chaos reigns supreme--throwing your character into tailspins that ratchet up tension and make the whole world (or story) a little more terrifying, complicated and interesting. I had a flashpoint experience this past weekend, while hanging out in the woods...

This past weekend I participated in the CARDA (California Rescue Dog Association) training day. My task: get lost in the woods and allow teams of handlers and their certified rescue dogs to find me. I was to station myself at the end of some gnarly trails—some long, some with steep ravines and river crossings. Once “in position,” the handler and dog would follow my scent out into the woods and rescue me.

Though I may not look it, I’m a nature girl at heart. I spent my childhood hiking and climbing through the woods where we lived, bringing home more foxtails and poison oak in a single day than an entire troop of Boy Scouts ever could. And when I wasn’t there, I was in North Carolina doing the same, with poison sumac, nettles, and once, a horse. I was constantly in the woods alone or with my best friend, or, on occasion, my brother and his troop of idiot friends when he’d let me play Indiana Jones with them (I always had to be whatever they were hunting).

Back then, it never occurred to me to be frightened. I was careful, sure, and listened diligently to the good advice gleaned from the older kids—like keeping my mouth wide open lest I get lock jaw from the rusty nail in my knee. I had a deep respect for nature, for what was bigger than me, for the hills that I could climb and those I couldn’t. I never rushed anything and was always content to just be in nature, letting it slowly engulf me and tell its secrets and stories.

So, thirty some odd years later I found myself hunkered down on the soft pine needles once again, breathing lungfuls of clean mountain air. It should have been like coming home, but it wasn’t. When a twig snapped, I lost my breath. When there was a rustle in the trees, I was sure it was a bear or an Amway salesman or a psycho killer come to get me. I was nervous and antsy and couldn’t remember what I liked about being in the woods in the first place.

I pulled out my notebook and pencil and balanced it on my lap. When I was a kid, I’d always take a writing break. Then, it was to record the things that I saw, my observations evolving into (terrible) stories. I just wrote and wrote, content in nature, not caring if what I wrote was any good or was going to feed me for the next year, sure that every creak and rustle in the woods behind me was a squirrel, a mouse, maybe a deer. Nothing scary. Nothing growing fangs and claws in my imagination, nothing stopping me.

Sitting there in those woods on Saturday, I wondered when I had gotten so scared. When everything about writing became about proving something, selling something, am I fast? Is it good? Will it sell? It was probably about the same time that I no longer believed in monsters under my bed but instead created them everywhere else: editors, agents, other writers, rejection letters, writer’s block. Fear is paralyzing—movement is life.

Out there in the woods, I forced myself to move the pencil.

Something rustled in the brush behind me.

I finished my chapter.

I kept writing and the fear kept slipping away.

Nature soothed me and I remembered what I loved and the words kept coming.

There was a crash behind me, something tromping, breaking twigs and rustling the pine needles.

April 22, 2015

Flashpoints are events that provide the writer with a story to tell. They introduce chaos where none existed. A flashpoint can occur before the story begins. Sometimes it occurs after the introduction, when the characters are introduced and the scene set. What matters is to get the reader hooked early on. In Twisted Vines, the first book in my Shakespeare in the Vineyard series, the critical moment comes in paragraph one of chapter one when my protagonist receives a phone call that changes her life—she inherits a vineyard and two Shakespearean theaters from someone she’d never heard of. If she accepts her inheritance, it means she has to move cross-country and give up a job she loves.

Without conflict, there wouldn’t be a story. It’s what drives the plot, what makes us sympathize with the characters, and what compels us to keep reading because we want to know how it will be resolved. When characters have opposite goals or desires there’s bound to be reaction. Tempers flare, violence/anger follow, and provoke action. Flashpoints, moments of truth, hours of indecision, or that frightening zero hour will create suspense and intrigue to keep readers turning the pages.

These examples of “points of no return” will be familiar to most readers:

The Wizard of Oz: the flashpoint is the tornado that transports Dorothy from Kansas to Oz

Star Wars: Darth Vader attacks Princess Leia’s spaceship

I think all authors struggle where best to place flashpoints, where they'll have the most impact on the story and the reader. I couldn't resist this cartoon. I wonder what they're writing, suspense or romantic suspense.

April 21, 2015

Ah, the dictionary is a lovely thing... as a starting point for a post, a definition is hard to beat (and apparently Michael agrees with me, as you'll see when you read his post about "flashpoint" from yesterday).

Now, here are the two definitions that popped up on my screen, thanks to Google:

FLASHPOINT

a place, event, or time at which trouble, such as violence or anger, flares up.

the temperature at which a particular organic compound gives off sufficient vapor to ignite in air.

In fiction, writers rely on emotional flashpoints all the time to justify a twist in action, character, and motivation. They often provide a kind of "tipping point" or point of no return.

You can use an emotional flashpoint to propel a character into doing something incredibly stupid, such as (imagination at work here) having your protagonist chase the theoretical killer down a dark alley in the middle of the night. With no flashlight. An an empty gun. And no backup.

Or, a flashpoint can bring out the sudden (and perhaps unexpected) noble and courageous side of a character, such as maybe the theoretical killer's father--who is the REAL killer--is waiting at the other end of the alley for his daughter to arrive. He hears the protagonist shout "Stop or I'll shoot!" sees the gun come up... and jumps forward to push his daughter out of the way and take the (theoretical) bullet in her stead.

Oh, I said the protagonist's gun was empty, didn't I. Hmmmm. I'll leave it to you to ponder what might happen next.

Or, you could go with the second definition of flashpoint and have fun with flammables... let there be light in that dark alley!

April 20, 2015

A flash point is the lowest temperature at which a volatile material can vaporize to form an ignitable mixture in air, not to be confused with an ignition point, which is the minimum temperature at which a substance will continue to burn without additional application of external heat. I’ve always marveled at such things, but found them mystifying. Hmm, I think we should have given this topic to Camille to write about. Nevertheless, I’ll put in my two cents as best I can.

When I was in Army basic training at Fort Polk, Louisiana, another GI and I were ordered to eradicate some streaks of tar on a sidewalk leading into a building. To accomplish this, the drill sergeant told us to wet some rags and a brush with gasoline from a five-gallon metal can. These cans, called Gerri cans, were designed to fit on the back of a Jeep, in case the vehicle ran out of fuel. The drill sergeant left and I unscrewed the top of the Gerri can. The other GI took out a pack of cigarettes and stuck one between his lips.

“Hey,” I said. “This is gasoline. Don’t smoke.”

He shrugged and told me that there was no danger. “I used to work at a gas station,” he said. “You can put a lit cigarette out in one of them cans. Here, lemme show ya.”

Before he could do anything more, I used all my persuasive powers to dissuade him, saying that I had no interest in seeing any demonstration. I mean, I’d seen countless movies where the bad guy used a cigarette to ignite a pool of gasoline to create havoc. Wasn’t that proof enough? At the same time, I moved the Gerri can farther away from him, showed him my fist, and mentioned that if he lighted the cigarette, he'd wake up in the hospital. “I never worked at a gas station,” I told him, “but I have documented, one-punch-knockout power in my right hand.”

Years later, when I was a cop, I found out that the other GI was right. A burning cigarette won’t ignite liquid gasoline. This occurred during a call of a gasoline leak at a gas station. A patron had been smoking when the spillage occurred and his burning cigarette did not cause a conflagration. “For liquid gasoline,” one of the firefighters told me, “you need an open flame to ignite it.”

Again, I decided to take him at his word, but wondered about those videos of people catching on fire at gas stations that I’d seen on the Internet. How exactly did that happen?

The answer, I subsequently found out, was deceptively misleading. While it was true that the liquid form of gasoline has an ignition point higher than that of a burning cigarette, there is still a danger of igniting the vapors given off by the gas. And, as everyone knows, if the vapors ignite, any liquid gasoline present would also catch fire. This can sometimes occur from static electricity.

This isn’t confined to gasoline, either. Dust explosions are another dangerous hazard. Take flour, for instance. An explosion can occur if the air is filled with these tiny, flammable particles. All it takes is a spark to ignite one of them and kaboom!

Regardless, I was always pretty strict about smoking at the scene of a spillage, be it gas or flour or whatever. On more than one occasion I told bystanders to extinguish their cigarettes at accident scenes. Drunks, however, can be less than cooperative and sometimes argumentative. If any of them brought up the gasoline ignition point issue, I would simply reply that I detested the odor of burning tobacco.

This brings to mind another case in which a man, who was suicidal and under the influence of some intoxicant, doused himself with gasoline and held a lighter in his hand threatening to set himself on fire. The officers managed to corner him in his backyard, near the garage. The negotiations continued, while options were quickly discussed. Using a Taser was out, even though the ignition point of the gasoline might have been high enough to prevent the Taser from igniting it, I didn’t want to be the first to test it. And rushing him to wrestle the lighter out of his hand seemed equally problematic. All he had to do was “flick his Bic” and a conflagration would be immediate. Luckily, bean-bag rounds were available. These are rounds containing a small, Kevlar sack filled with lead shot. The rounds fit into a standard shotgun which is usually designated by an orange stock. Thus, it became a matter of diversion: a couple officers kept the gasoline drenched, suicidal dude talking, while the officer with the bean-bag shotgun sneaked around behind the garage and shot the suspect in his hind quarters. The force of the round knocked the man to the ground, and the lighter slipped from his fingers, allowing the coppers in front to grab and restrain him. The suspect did sustain a huge, strawberry-colored bruise on his left buttocks, which was documented with a quick photo. I should add that as he was being transported to the hospital for psychiatric evaluation, and treatment for the big bruise to his behind, I saw a couple lawyers chasing the ambulance offering their services to sue the police department for excessive use of force.

Grin.

Nah, I made that last part up. The last thing I want to do is cast aspersions on the legal system and those who are engaged in it. The flash point for igniting a lawsuit is a lot lower than that of gasoline.